This invention relates to the control and processing of documents such as bank checks and more particularly to the automatic reading of handwritten amount characters located on bank checks for use in processing such checks through the banking system.
The processing of checks includes the sorting, distribution and proving of all deposit transactions arising from the commerical operations of the bank. The sorting of checks includes separating the checks in accordance with the bank the check is drawn on. Further processing includes the imprinting of the amount of check directly on the check for confirming such amount. Modern document processing systems encompass all item processing objectives including the listing and balancing of amounts for use in proving the documents, encoding information on the checks for use in distributing the checks, endorsing, microfilming, sorting and distributing the checks in accordance with their final destination. The cost of such processing in considerable, and many systems have been devised to reduce the cost of such processing. As a result of these endeavors, magnetic printing and readers have been employed, together with optical character recognition apparatus, for reading particular machine-printed characters.
In spite of these attempts, checks processed in today's banking systems still require manual encoding of the amount of the check in magnetic ink on the check with contributes to the high cost of such an operation. Various systems have been proposed in the past for reading handwritten characters. While the recognition systems themselves have been proved to be workable, the variations in the handwritten characters of all customers of a bank have been of such magnitude that the cost of operating such a system would be greater than the manual encoding of such amounts. It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for reducing the cost of processing written documents such as bank checks and the like. It is a further object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus for processing bank checks in which the handwritten amounts are optically read and recognized.